News of our pregnancy and the impending outcome was exciting. We had tried for so long that we had nearly given up hope. With the one major scare around 27 weeks, full term and the short remaining time came sharply into focus. Even as things calmed down and the day of his arrival neared, it would be impossible to anticipate the feeling of joy and love experienced when we finally made our acquaintance.

A__ did amazing despite her perfectly rational fear of labor. When contractions started a mere 16 hours before a scheduled induction, she stayed calm and relaxed at home. After 12 hours of contractions 20-30 minutes apart, she had to be convinced by me and one particularly strong contraction to call the doctor and see when they wanted her to come in. By the time we were in the car driving through a driving monsoon of a storm to the hospital, contractions were five minutes apart. Stopping a few times on our way to the Labor and Delivery department, once because I went to the wrong floor in the elevator, we got paperwork out of the way and got A__ settled into a bed for her initial exam.

Waiting again for a contraction to pass, the doctor proclaimed her dilated 7 cm already! She had already done a major part of the labor at home without medication, but she was definitely ready for the epidural now. They had to hurry everything to get the epidural in before it was too late and they missed their window. Water broken, drugs administered, family arrived, and a mere 2 hours from our arrival, she was ready to start pushing.  As fast as everything was moving we figured we be through this in no time, but it was another two hours and one vacuum (The Baby-Suck 5000, I believe) later that O__ arrived, slamming shut the book on the before times.

The changes have made me look back at my previous life with more appreciation, but not an ounce of remorse can be found. My outlook has changed like putting away old spectacles and opting for new ones. The focus is different. The light in which I see things is different. I am different. For such a small creature (and he is quite small), his gravitational pull is that of a whole new galaxy.

Oliver Leo

7/25/2010 1:10 AM

6 lbs. 7 oz.   19″ Long

A Keeper

“In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man, Brave, Hated, and Scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, For then it costs nothing to be a Patriot.”
— Mark Twain

This time of year, the patriotic season, is nauseating to me. The flag-waving, the unquestioning praise of brutality and its murderous perpetrators, and the shallowness of it all leaves me cranky and cynical. Why is patriotism wrapped up so much in war and aggression? Is there another kind of patriotism, one that values the principles of freedom and tolerance and displays a love of place and people maybe just a bit more than less familiar geography?

The shallowness of the predominant incarnation of patriotism is evident in the way it is sold and marketed. Just like everything else – corporate or otherwise – governments market themselves. It used to be called propaganda, now it is just marketing. The marketing of government, just like other stuff, is more important than the product. No, the marketing is the product.

Government markets patriotism. When people are patriotic, they are patriotic about their government, not their country. They cheer the maiming of the nation’s youth and hold that sacrifice up as heroism. We celebrate the victims because the government marketing is very effective, but they are still victims, not heroes. We cheer oppression and the heavy hand and call it freedom. We are tethered like dogs on a chain by the very thing we hold high with our patriotism, but at least we don’t stand out from the crowd. We’d be patriotic to cover our asses if we weren’t so stupid to believe it all and feel some sense of power from the association with the biggest bully on the block.

There are no patriots, only dogs; dumb, obedient dogs. America, fuck yeah!

The new poem For my unborn child can be found under the Poetry tab at the top of the page. Today we are T-minus 5 weeks. Who knows how long before the child actually reads this, but hopefully they don’t stop reading it.

This weekend, after what seemed like weeks of rain, we finally made it outside to tend to the yard. More specifically, we were removing grass and weeds that had invaded our landscaping on the front and sides of the house. The mulch – what was left of it – is two years old and essentially dirt now, thus reversing its role from preventer to enabler. After we cleaned up the beds, A__ set to trimming and shaping the bushes. The junipers we put in two years ago have grown faster than expected and the boxwoods are growing at a rate I wouldn’t expect. Looking at all this growth, especially of the boxwoods, got me to thinking about time and patience. And roots.

Ever since I saw little boxwood shrubs around the rose garden at Mill Creek Park, I had wanted some of my own; they are full, lushly green, and yet pleasant to the touch, unlike some other low shrubs that are, um, twiggy. After first seeing them at the park, we checked around the greenhouses for the sake of planning, since we weren’t ready to landscape the yard yet, and found them to be quite expensive, nearly killing the idea of having them at all. Nearing the end of that summer, still not ready to do any landscaping, we came across some small boxwoods on sale at Walmart. They were on sale for much less than we had previously seen them, but they were still rather small. We decided that they were worth picking up and just throwing in the yard anywhere until we found a permanent use for them, which would let them grow into the size of bush we couldn’t afford to buy.

It was two, maybe three, years later that we undertook to making major changes to our landscaping. Our plans centered around using the boxwoods we had planted years before, though they would have to be moved. The junipers we put in were also undersized in order to save money, knowing that they’d grow into the look we wanted. At first, it all looked dwarfed and too small for our house, but we were patient. While looking it all over this weekend I felt the patience had paid off.

Feeling that the patience and investment for the long term had paid off in the fruition of a vision, I felt like we had accomplished something. Dare I say I felt a bit of pride at the growth of those old boxwoods. When I was relaying this feeling to A___, I said “If I feel like this about shrubs, imagine what a child will be like.”

The boxwoods turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Over the next couple of days I have reflected on all the little things around us that are represented by the microcosm of the boxwoods. So much of the stuff around us had their roots in our past: some of the sections of our garden that are just now producing meaningful stock, such as our asparagus patch, the compost piles that have actually produced rich dirt, the landscaping, and so much more inside the house.  This says nothing of the roots we have laid down in our relationship. I think of so much of our past and feel that much more secure in our future because our roots are running pretty deep. And I think of roots now that we are on the verge of sprouting.

I think family is about roots: roots between two people; roots between generations. Roots aren’t laid down quickly; they take time and patience. Often, it takes getting your hands dirty and putting in some hard work. Roots are the support structure that offer stability to those springing from them and are more difficult to remove the further they grow.  Where have you put down roots?

I first ventured into MySpace a few years ago for the purpose of having my blog posts reach friends who normally wouldn’t go to my blog or who were outside of the philosophical sphere where this blog normally resides. It was easy to remain anonymous enough on MySpace from random name searches, yet easy to reach out to friends and acquaintances. I essentially abandoned MySpace when Facebook proved the better tool.

The major difference I dealt with when focusing my “social networking” energy on Facebook from MySpace was abandoning my nom de plume and signing up as myself. So, essentially my Facebook account had nothing to do with this blog or anything I have ever done online – the vast majority of which is done under the name PintofStout. After a while, I eventually started a page for Murphy’s Bye-Laws and have (potentially) gained readers I wouldn’t have previously. My anonymity became much less since the page was administered by my real name, but my concerns about such things are fading fast, anyway.

The last piece of the “social networking” puzzle for me, and by far the most significant, is Twitter. (The Facebook page and Twitter links are in the right sidebar just under those RSS links that are sooo 2009.)  I started a Twitter account to be the fill-in between posts so I would still be heard of without having to write nearly as much. It took me a long time to figure out what to say and how to say it, though. The secret came in third-party applications that made Twitter more convenient, and even connected the Facebook page to the Twitter account.

Third-party software or applications are an excellent gateway into these networks. They make posting to either Facebook or Twitter or both easier by eliminating the need to navigate to the webpages themselves. Add to desktop applications the explosion in smart phones and texting phones that untether these networks from an actual computers and I no longer have to be at a computer with some spare time to write a pithy remark or pass on an article (previously done with Del.icio.us, also on the right sidebar) or make personal updates.

As it is with anything as popular as “social networking” sites, separating the substance from the spam can be daunting – bordering on impossible. Privacy can also be a concern, regardless of trying to keep a personality anonymous or not. It seems to me that Facebook may be in the process of selling itself right out of meaningful existence for many savvy users, in fact. Just like there are ways to limit what you see from your friends – and what friends to see – on Facebook, there are privacy settings that can help decide who and what people can see of your information (and if you aren’t using a browser that has the capacity to block ads, why are you even reading this?). Twitter also has privacy settings about who can see your tweets, but you create your own spam depending on who you choose to follow.

I keep putting “social networking” in quotes because I’m not entirely sure it is an accurate description of what we are talking about. Is it networking? Sure. People connect with others based on a common thread between them, such as a high school or political interests, etc. People can also connect to friends of friends based on some trait or interest, thus network. Fine. Is it social, though? Well, it does involve people and kind-of communities, but it is all done from a distance, from isolation.

Any kind of internet community, from comment sections of major blogs to message boards to Twitter itself, still struggles against the perception of an isolated, lonely loser in their parents’ basement typing away furiously under an exposed light bulb hanging from a wire. This image will be hard to shake because it is the most convenient way to disregard someone’s opinion that you don’t agree with. These social networks are bringing people together in active communities, either around a specific issue or interest or just to be social and put faces to names. I never doubted the validity of relationships made online; they’re just different than personal acquaintances. Blogging isn’t dead, either. Believe it or not, there are limits to what can be conveyed in 140 characters. The advantages of the decentralization of blogs can be demonstrated by Wikileaks’ interaction with Facebook. Despite drawbacks, these social networks are just tools in community building and information sharing. The toolbox is as big as ever, so my advice is to find the couple of tools that work best and avoid having the tool belt too big maintain.

Blogging, like American democracy, was a noble experiment for me.  And, depending on perspective and unlike American democracy, my blogging has been moderately successful. There have been droughts in my writing before, too, but this one seems so much more recent.

Of course, I have been busy beyond imagination with work and preparing for the arrival of our first child (not to mention my work on String Theory, cancer research, moonlighting as a costumed-crime fighter, and formulating an argument for why Lemieux is the greatest hockey player ever, bar none). As usual, when I’m too busy to find time to write, I have multiple ideas and topics on which to write. Then when things slow down, I have no motivation, energy, or ideas on which to write. That’s probably a Murphy’s Law or something.

I’m not not busy now, but I’m also not crazy busy, which explains the existence and the mediocrity of this nonsensical post. What? So, if you’re reading here for the first time since January, then stick around for another sub-par (that’s good, right?) post about social media and communication and shit.

The headline should read “Policy-making Patsies Prevent Production in Prototypical Pandering Performance”. Ok, maybe not, but it is all true. This “emergency” legislation took away a person’s opportunity to add some productive service to his community. Zoning laws had already made this man’s opening of a firearms repair business more difficult, the council then sought to make it impossible. Based on the comments under the article, the council is surely pandering to the police force (who’d have imagined the police want a disarmed populace?) and other weak-kneed, uninformed citizens.

The fact that this person had thought to ask permission of government to try and make a living is repulsive. Governments create jobs?! HAHAHAHAHA! That’s laughable. This unidentified man should refuse to pay his property tax because he cannot use his property the way he sees fit; a way that does absolutely no harm to the people around him. Is the City of Cambell also going to become a dry town, not allowing the sale of alcohol to protect its citizens from the vastly more dangerous threat it causes? Or ban the sale of automobiles or hammers or stairs, since all of these things are very dangerous tools? Perhaps the practicing of law should be outlawed; we all know how dangerous a lawyer can be!

Even though this story is mostly focused on guns, I won’t rehash all the pro-and anti-gun arguments. I will say in closing, though, that prohibiting the sale of guns wouldn’t likely prohibit the sale of service on guns. Maybe this person has a case, after all.

*Read The Law of Conservation of Rights to see why rights cannot be taken away.

I quote Henry Miller in my email signature as saying, “Chaos is the score on which reality is written.” I also find this to be true. Call it a worldview. Fate, destiny, preordination; these all only exist in the imaginations of those who prognosticate what has already happened. The delicate imbalance of a single object with the entire universe – the forces acting on it, the forces acting IN it! – depends on an infinite number of variables. This whole equation raised to the power of everything else in the universe is the equation for the chaos we refer to as The Universe – or in Henry Miller’s words, “reality”. The fact that many things happen predictably over and over and over again shouldn’t diminish the perception of the uncontrolled and random nature of the universe. What we humans perceive as controlled, predictable, or even constant are but a mere snapshot of a universe in flux. Our human existence is a single frame in this Kevin Costner-length epic. So how can a snapshot seem to move so fast and be so out-of-control so much of the time? Well…

It appears to me that the speed of our lives is an illusion from all the stuff we squeeze into each day, which increases with the speed with which we can transmit ideas. Some people thrive on a hectic schedule and may rely on the activity to keep their brain stimulated. Others can immerse themselves in the flurry of activity in order to lose track of inconvenient truths while their mind is distracted. Still others buckle under the weight of obligations and activities. Regardless of how it is dealt with, the appearance of speed in our lives continues to increase.

I would like to postulate that the organizational structures erected purportedly to help us deal with such accelerating lives actually do the opposite. Social constructs and our various roles and responsibilities inside of them help to alienate us from the chaotic flux of events and restricts our ability to go with that flow and integrate ourselves into that flow. Being alien to this chaotic symbiosis of the universe – or trying real hard to be, anyway – makes it even more daunting and adds to the illusion of great haste in the pace of our existence.

Wearing Many Identities

Based on the above picture, the many hats we choose to accept for ourselves can make fighting against the flux of the universe seem damned-near impossible. Removing the institutional structures that pile many of these hats on, and figuring out a place in the flux, can help our motion sickness. Once integrated into this chaotic flux of existence we can learn to navigate within it, rather than trying hard to fight it. Embrace the chaos.

Hail Eris.

Let’s call the season delineations we currently have the astronomical seasons for obvious reasons. The weather associated with the astronomical seasons (the weather season) don’t fall neatly into the delineated times, though. One season’s associated weather likely bleeds into the preceding season giving the appearance that the season’s weather arrives first, like a Secret Service security team before a presidential stump speech.  That is because the weather is greatly affected, if not wholly produced, by the angle of the sun. The astronomical season markers are marking extremes, meaning both sides of the extreme will be very similar. If we had weather-delineated seasons, these markers should fall precisely in the middle.  Winter would encompass the months of December, January, and February; Spring would consist of March, April, and May; Summer containing June, July, and August; and leaving Autumn with September, October, and November.

Of course, weather is messy. Down in the dirty chaos of atmosphere, moisture, dirt, and wind there are no specific points to demarcate a change in seasons based solely on weather.  Perhaps this is why it would be best to not delineate the seasons so much as simply mark the progress of the year with those four extreme days. But knowing us humans, it is always about us and what we want and what we feel and how something affects us with little regard to facts or logic. So we’ll continue to have wintry weather in late fall and summery weather in late spring, etc, etc.

I’ve written on these pages before about how seasonal transitions would be a significant time to mimic our sun and pull an about-face in some manner. Some wait until New Year’s Eve to lie to themselves about change. Maybe the complete lack of significance to the new year holiday (or it could be the champagne!) contributes to the dismal success rate of new year’s resolutions. So this year try it out on a solstice and see how it works.

Some related posts:

Season’s Change

Spring Metamorphosis

New Year’s Resolve